There's a strong anti Mars settlement sentiment going on, not just anti "space tourism". The idea, which I don't really subscribe to in this context, that we should utilize whatever resources we assign to space towards fighting climate change and fixing problems here on Earth.

It is one thing to be against a Mars settlement and another to be against space exploration.

E.g. it would serve the latter better if we would explore Venus, Europa, Titan, etc. than trying to live underground on a dead poisonous planet.

Trying to live underground on a dead planet might just prove that we need Earth. Lots of people say space tourism is silly and then go gas up their car while complaining that Teslas are how the coastal elites will take their retirement.

To add on, I think there’s a lot of value to be had in the various science that can only be done with boots on the ground on Mars. The rovers have been great don’t get me wrong, but a team of scientists with a Starship full of equipment can do volumes more research in a couple of weeks than a rover can during its entire mission, including things that weren’t originally planned.

What we learn there can be helpful for understanding the history of the solar system as well as planetary dynamics (remember that in terms of well-studied planets, we’re currently at sample size = 1).

How fast do we actually need to learn about Mars? How far are we willing to go, how much are we willing to spend just to speed things up there?

We don’t live in the 1950s or the 1890s any more. We are not willing to sacrifice the lives of our explorers like we did when we went to the moon or Antarctica in the 1960s and 1900s respectively. We are not engaging in juvenile races to “get there first” which is both expensive and dangerous.

The space exploration of today is more collaborative and careful then the explorations of the past. So we don’t risk the lives of our explorers nor the unnecessary expenses of getting things done 20 years when we can do it in 50 for far less money and with infinity more safety.

It’s difficult to answer that question with any level of certainty. That said, there’s a line of thinking that we should do these things while we still can, because there’s no guarantee that we’ll continue to be able to do them. I tend to agree with that.

So it’s not about trying to race and and get there first, but rather making sure that the opportunity doesn’t pass us by.

As far as cost goes… these sorts of missions are expensive relative to the amounts of money most of us work with in a regular basis, but compared to the vast sums that get put toward far more questionable and frivolous uses it’s a drop in the bucket. If saving money or rerouting funds to more deserving causes is a goal, there’s several tens of bushels of lower hanging fruit elsewhere that should be looked at first — anything with scientific purpose should be trimmed last.

The 2 Rovers from the last 2000s cost about a billion dollars. If we can get someone to moon for $2.9 billion (contract that spacex just won), I think that's worth it.

This completely ignores the political aspects. Once China makes significant progress towards landing on the Moon, the US will definitely ramp up as fast as possible. Nationalism is a virus that's undefeated...

Just to put it out there: An individual car owner is insignificant when talking about climate change. This is regardless of how the car is powered. A Tesla owner that owns stock in Shell and votes conservative is much more problematic then a non-voting F-150 owner that works paycheck to paycheck. However both of them are insignificant next to the Shell board of directors or the US government who bear the real responsibility here in prolonging climate inaction.

This is all just to say. A non-voting F-150 owner who talks shit about rich people going to space is actually not doing any damage while filling up his truck, next to that rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope in a singe space visit for his own amusement.

>”…that rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope in a singe space visit for his own amusement.”

None of the space tourists so far have been particularly known for their conservative politics. Nor do I find space tourism to be some lauded thing in conservative circles.

>Tesla owner that owns stock in Shell and votes conservative is much more problematic then a non-voting F-150 owner that works paycheck to paycheck.

>rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope

Wow

There are a few more F-150 drivers than there are Shell board members or rich conservative space tourists.

Then blame the Ford executives which keep manufacturing and marketing these cars, not the drivers.

So only executives and rich people should be held accountable? Exactly how rich must one be?

I’m basically just shifting the responsibility from the consumer to the people with the power to influence said consumption. This is basically just extending the logic of “If everyone is making the same mistake, blaming every individual is futile. Perhaps the system should be altered in such a way which makes it harder for people to make this mistake in the first place”.

So to answer your question: “How rich”: Rich enough to own significant stock in polluting corporations.

I, for one, think permanent Mars settlement is a dumb idea, but I look forward to watching someone try it.

I think mars settlement is an eventuality, someone will be there. I also think that settlement of mars has a huge first mover advantage, maybe unlike anything else in human history. It may even come before that with the first permanent lunar base and launch platform.

I actually doubt that. Unless they also ship massive number of very specialized and power weapon systems.

Planets are big, like absolutely massive. You can easily catch up, specially if you get intel on inevitable failures of first movers.

There were always people that opposed space exploration. They’ve been wrong every time.

Having been wrong changes few people's minds. Even about whether they were wrong.

Anyone that has seen Blade Runner and the news should see that as a concern.

The rich would spoil Earth and defile it and then move off to the ultimate gated community of Mars, leaving us to deal with the consequences of their actions.

This has always been a bad idea based of unrealistic science fiction.

Mars is the spoiled planet, and will be until some point technology is a lot further along. The rich are not going to run away to some wonderland. Earth is the garden, and nothing else is like it in space.

Yep. The list of things that could make Earth a worse place to live than Mars is very short. A big enough asteroid to liquefy the entire crust would do it, for a while. A "mere" dinosaur-killer wouldn't be enough. Nor would nuclear war. Most of the rest of the options are still sci-fi, like Grey Goo events, or a very contagious very deadly infectious disease (and that would have to have some way of sticking around for a long time, for an orbital habitat or sealed earthbound habitat not to still be better than Mars, since you could get back more easily once it was gone or we had a way to fight it).

Otherwise you've gotta start stacking disasters to get close, and even then it's pretty difficult. Mars is really bad.

Just look at decadence in rather inhospitable environments on earth... Let's take Dupai or some deserts in USA with golf courses. No way whole Earth will get worse than that. And basically we already have luxury lifes in such places, air conditioned malls, apartments, cars. Over use of water to water lawns...

Also, it is not like you couldn't vastly more cheaply and easily build Mars bunker on Earth. As we are centuries away from planet scale geo-engineering.

Agreed, I think another thing missed by so many is that if we can settle mars that same technology can be used here on earth to make inhospitable parts of the planet usable again should we mess it up badly enough.

Yes I know that. But do THEY know that? I’m not so sure. Elon/Bezos seem to think you can hand wave/buy the radiation away like they do their problems on earth. Maybe with absolutely massive amounts of money they could find a way. And we would be the ones footing the bill for that.

We don't have the technology to make Mars anything better than a miserable hell.

If we did, it would still work better to just use it here on some isolated land.

The technology to make mars psychologically livable may simply be having some people grow up there.

The comment I replied to was about people with wealth and power "escaping" there.

No no, didn't you read the article? With Starship we could launch 12 * 100,000 30m wide light sails and heat up Mars!

Such a ridiculous idea puts the rest of the article in a very questionable light for me.

It is a fact that we could launch light sails, and even heat up Mars a bit. The idea might be silly, but at least it is thinking big. Some other big idea will be better, including several of those listed after the light-sails bit.

The earth-sized radio telescope made out of Starlink transceivers is an obvious winner. Total coverage ground radar using the transceiver antenna is another.

If such thing could be used to heat up Mars, could it be used to cool down Earth?

There's a strong "Mars settlement is impossible" sentiment going on, which is different.

I am all for exploring space. I just loathe the fact that we have billionaires with no technical training calling the shots.

(Well, maybe not "exploring". There isn't much to see! I'm very much for using space.)

>>> public opinion is opposed to space exploration

It's always been true ;)

If you put it to a vote, majority of americans will allocate public funds towards terrestrial concerns over a new space lab. Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. In today's dollars, what was nasa's highest yearly budget: maybe $30B? Let's see what 5% of US GDP devoted to Space R&D and Peaceful Expansion by mid century looks like!

I don’t really think that’s the case - it’s more nuanced. Most Americans are pro space exploration [1], but against manned missions and colonization efforts [2]. I have a strong feeling most people are probably also against boondoggle projects like SLS and seemingly-constant massive cost overruns on things like JWST.

This makes sense if you think about it - flying humans around the solar system just doesn’t make much sense until we have actual orbital industry at some point in the future to bring the costs down to a reasonable level. And I personally have to agree with the camp opposed to Mars colonization, but for different reasons than most. Mars is kind of a crappy place to try and live by most metrics. It seems like colonization efforts would be better allocated to large asteroids or water-rich moons.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-a...

[2] https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/25/space-force-travel-exp...

> Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant.

When someone (usually NASA or NASA fanboys) does a Gish gallop and drops of huge list of things supposedly created by NASA, it's worth picking a couple to take a deep dive into. When you look at the details, the amount of tech transfer is often not anywhere close to the amount claimed.

Still, there is good science and technology that comes out of NASA. But it's likely we'd have a lot better results if a large chunk of the NASA budget wasn't spent throwing people up into space for no reason.

>>> huge list of things supposedly created by NASA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Bowflex ;)

I honestly don’t understand why public opinion matters so much for space exploration while the military budget is not held to the same standard.

Honestly though several really nice space exploration projects have been well founded by several governments (including India, China, Europe and North America). Some really silly projects have also been privately funded (e.g. space tourism for the rich). People are rightly questioning how people get so insanely rich that they can afford this. They ask if they are paying their fair share of taxes, if they pay their workers fairly, and which contracts the government have offered them.

If you separate those two classes of space projects I bet you would find way more support for the former (or at least some indifference) while you would find that people vehemently oppose the latter.

If you put it to a vote, majority of Americans will allocate public funds towards stimulus cheques and not the military.... what majority of Americans would allocate funds towards is not necessarily the thing that gets done.

If you put it to a vote and said we can continue to fund NASA or your taxes can be lowered by $75 / year, NASA would be done.

You could probably say that about most government programs though.

Yep.